


The Cold

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Danger Man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-21
Updated: 2008-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:25:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1638791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From time to time, even John Drake feels the chill.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cold

**Author's Note:**

> Written for SJ Kasabi

 

 

I.

Bill Vincent doesn't look back.

Drake watches him from the corner of his eye as he drives, but the dull roar of the nearby runway would drown out all attempts at conversation, and he's not sure he'd try if he had the chance. 

One wife's betrayal did what ten years in M9 failed to accomplish; his friend, always ribbed for being so open and trusting, is broken, angry, hard. Drake thinks of that, lets himself hate Lesley for a moment, and it's an ordinary, protective hatred, simple without the spectre of a gas canister under the seat, without the weaselly little men deciding who should live or die, and how. 

People betray each other all the time, he thinks, and almost believes it.

It isn't until they're back in Baghdad that Bill finally speaks up, his voice harsh, grating. "Let me out here."

Wordlessly, Drake pulls into an alley; further along, a boy is leaning against a rubbish bin and teasing a mottled, scarred old tabby cat with a long piece of grass. Every now and then, the cat reaches up and is left clawing at the air as the boy laughs and pulls the grass away. Drake finds himself unable to stop watching the game.

"Damned decent of you," Bill is saying, and his voice has a strained, stupid joviality. "Not many people have friends who'd leap into a speeding car on their behalf."

"Don't," says Drake. With a yelp, the cat makes a particularly inelegant landing and the boy erupts in a fit of giggles. 

After a moment, he hears Bill open the door and get out; he doesn't hear the door close. Drake tightens his grip on the steering wheel. "What'll you do now?"

"Get older," says Bill. "Old as they want me to, anyway. That's all a man can hope for, isn't it?"

It's an old toast of theirs, the sort of cliche they'd bandy around, drunk on some shared success, and Lesley would laugh at their earnestness, and tell them they were being awfully silly, and pretend-

Drake bangs a hand against the horn; boy and cat glance up, spooked, and dash off.

"I'm going to run, Drake," says Bill. Drake looks up sharply, but Bill reaches out, grabs him by the arm; Drake's muscles twitch to shrug off the grip, to follow it up with a counterattack, but he forces the instincts down. Bill shakes his head, reading the internal struggle in his expression. "I'm going to run as far and as fast as I can," he says, and his grip tightens. "If you've got an ounce of humanity left, John, you'll do the same."

Drake feels his jaw clench. "You're a fool, Bill," he says, thickly.

"Well," says Bill, and releases Drake's arm, "that's something."

He slams the car door, and, facing resolutely forward, Drake can only listen to him leave, the precise footfalls, faster and faster and quieter, never quite fading away. Even when he gets back, when he ignores the paperwork and avoids the debriefings, when they tolerate him, when they smile and call him "old man", he hears Bill's footsteps, feels the ache of adrenaline, sees his breath fog in the cold air.

They catch him; they always do.

II.

Drake doesn't carry a gun, but, in his experience, nearly everybody else does.

It's a split-second decision, and he makes the wrong one, darting for the cover of a bit of crumbling stone wall when he should've moved back towards the house. They catch him twice - in the calf, in the shoulder - and he goes down, and the grit of the pavement against his knees hurts more than anything.

Rough hands haul him to his feet; he has the brilliant notion of pretending to faint about a moment before he actually does.

When he wakes up, shivering and thirsty and hurting like hell, there's a cold cloth on his forehead. He doesn't move, trained to observe but not to react, taking in the ache of the wooden floor beneath him, the faint whiff of stale cigarette smoke, the absurd warmth of a blanket over his legs. The pain slips back in with consciousness, but it's dulled, and he recognizes a drugged smoothness to his thoughts, a wavering unreality.

His breathing is becoming too quick and loud to feign unconsciousness any longer, so he opens his eyes, squints into the harsh glare of a lamp. A shadow flickers in behind the light, and for a moment he feels like he's in some sort of film noir, like he's about to be interrogated by some stereotypical detective who speaks in clipped sentences that steadily increase in volume and decrease in originality.

"Ah," says a voice, and the glare swings out of his eyes, revealing a young man - automatically, Drake memorizes the shape of his ears, the part of the body least likely to be effectively disguised, and moves on to examine the cleft in the chin, the fine wrinkles around the eyes, the scar along the knuckles of the hand he's wiping on a bloodstained towel. "You're awake. Good. An ambulance is on its way."

Licking his dry lips, Drake smiles and says, in his best gangster voice, "You ain't got nothing on me, copper."

"Pardon?" The man leans closer, pulling the cloth away, and his hand ghosts across Drake's forehead. "Ah," he says. "You're a bit feverish. Only to be expected, I suppose. How do you feel?"

Drake considers the question for a long moment. "Like I've been shot." The man's mouth twitches at that, and Drake swallows as the room takes a sudden tilt. "Like I've been drugged."

The man snorts. "Good thing, too, or you'd be going into shock faster than I can keep you out of it. Feeling any pain?"

"A little." Something about the man's bearing is bothering Drake, and he struggles to keep his wandering thoughts in order. "Are you a doctor?"

The man shrugs. "Patching up bleeding spooks would be a strange hobby."

Drake stares at him for a long moment. The penny drops. "Oh," he says. "You're with them, then."

With a little shrug, the man manages to encompass the whole of the conflict, the ideologies and people involved, and his none-too-high opinion of them all. "They'd quite like to have you alive."

Shifting, Drake groans at the jolt it sends through his leg. "They should have thought of that before they shot me." 

The doctor raises his eyebrows, rummaging in his bag, and his voice is too casual. "They're going to want to question you, you know."

"I know."

The man turns back, lifts a syringe.

In that moment, Drake sees tiny bubbles of liquid catch the light as the man flicks the air from the glass tube, sees the look of careful patience in the routine action, sees the tightness around the eyes that isn't quite a smile, isn't quite a frown, and then there is a scream of thunder, a splintering of sound, and the man's eyes meet his, just for a moment, wide and surprised, before the blood starts running from the doctor's mouth, before he falls against the lamp with a little sigh-

"Drake," hisses a voice, somewhere to Drake's left. A dark-clad figure stumbles in, gun at the ready, and in the moving shadows of the swinging lamp, Drake imagines he can see smoke rising from the barrel. "Can you walk, Drake? We're getting you out."

Drake pushes to a sitting position, biting down on the pain, watching the blood pool around the doctor's head. 

"Come on." A hand grabs his good arm, and, looking up, Drake recognizes his contact, Lorne Matthews, a thin, balding man with nervous hands; he'd had him pegged as a double-agent from the start. Looked like he'd gone triple. "They'll have sounded the alarm. Let's go."

Drake stares at him for a long moment, and Matthews pulls him roughly to his feet, looping Drake's arm over his shoulders.

"You didn't have to do that," Drake mumbles, slumping against him, and for a terrible moment he's not sure whether he's trying to convince Matthews or himself. "You didn't have to do it."

With a grunt of effort, Matthews turns them both around, and Drake can barely make out his words through the roar of his own pulse. "Don't worry about it. What are friends for?"

III.

The violinist is short and stocky, but his wide, strong fingers ripple across the strings like firelight; his hand coaxes the bow forward and back with a peculiar grace - controlled, controlling.

Drake crosses his arms, watching from his secluded vantage point next to a column at the back of the music hall. The place is mostly empty: in the first few rows, a group of greying men and women peer up at the stage with the intent, absorbed, carefully composed expressions of people who know absolutely nothing about music.

Sometimes Drake wonders if there's some mannerism, some facial tic, some way of _being_ that gives killers and traitors away. Novels lend them a coldness, a desperation, a kind of madness that whispers at the corners of perception, but the violinist's face is contorted only during a particularly virtuosic sequence of arpeggios, and his hands are steady, and his eyes, when he looks over the heads of his audience as though seeing the world beyond, are warm with emotion.

The music wavers into something in a minor key, and Drake feels himself stiffen when the musician's expressive gaze fixes on him; the contact is momentary, electric, and then the violinist is staring, rapt, into the middle distance, abstracted. Drake watches the hands on the instrument - more confident, and the notes are sweeter, softer, less mechanical, less prepared. He knows, then, that they've smoked him out at last, that this is the last concert, the final movement.

The music is less perfect, and all the better for it.

By the time the man drifts into the final cadence, Drake is already moving, striding to the front of the room as the audience rouses itself from its torpor and applauds. The violinist bows once, from the waist, a faint smile still tugging at the edges of his lips.

With a jovial grin, Drake joins him on the stage and clasps his hand. "Haven't seen you in ages, old man!" he says. "Well done. Very well done."

The musician smiles back, gently extricating himself from Drake's grasp. "I thought you might like it."

They exchange improvised pleasantries while the meagre audience thins, creating enough imagined relations and mutual friends to populate a good-sized town in the process. "How is good old Uncle Rob, anyway?" Drake asks, effectively cutting off a bespectacled gentleman's congratulations, and drapes an arm over the violinist's shoulders to lead him away.

This time, the musician seems to have resigned himself to the touch, and he sighs theatrically. "Oh, you know. Same as ever." 

"Never changes, does he?" The words are glib, but Drake feels a chill as the violinist's expression shifts, becoming almost wistful.

"Nothing does," he says, and turns so sharply that Drake nearly belts him then and there, in front of the half-dozen octogenarians still milling around. Smiling, the musician catches his wrist in its involuntary twitch. "Jumpy?"

Drake doesn't answer.

"That was a decent thing you did," the violinist says, still clutching Drake's arm, and for an instant Drake thinks of the violin's bow, slipping against the strings with such careful precision, gliding in fits and starts across the melody. "Letting me finish, I mean. You could've jumped me from the start."

Drake nods back at the audience, most of whom have, by some miracle of Brownian motion, found their way to the exit. "Didn't want to make a scene," he says.

"All the same," the man says, releasing him, "thank you."

There's a formality to his words, something long rehearsed, something that Drake doesn't want to consider, not yet. "Will you make this easier on yourself?"

"I won't resist, if that's what you mean," says the musician, his tone calm and measured. "I killed Harris and Marshall, and I took the plans from Marshall's desk, and I made a tidy sum of money selling them. Coincidentally, I don't much regret it. The money's tied up in places even I don't know about, and some of it should find its way back to my daughter at some point."

Drake shrugs, recognizing the bravado for what it is, and starts to lead them towards the back doors, towards the car with the shaded windows waiting on the street, towards whatever comes after.

The violinist pipes up again before they reach the door, and Drake notes the new flicker of fear in his voice. "How do you do it?"

"Do what?"

"You're so damned sure of yourself," the man says, stopping again; this time, Drake merely tightens his grip on the man's arm, but the violinist holds his ground. "It's all over your face, the way you stand, everything - you don't pretend, you don't care about what they'll make you this time, you don't stay up at night trying to remember the people who gave you your real name, or what you did when you were eight years old, or whether you actually like classical music or not. To you, it's just not worth worrying, is it?"

Drake waits for a few moments, watching the violinist sweat. "Are you finished?"

"Just one question." The man's voice is quavering with emotion, and his fingers twitch as though reaching for violin, or bow, or gun. "Do you even know who the hell you are?"

Grinning, Drake shrugs. "I'm a free man," he says. "Which is, incidentally, more than I can say for you. Shall we?"

"If you're free," says the man, softly, trudging into step beside him, "I'd hate to see these chains you're not wearing." He nods towards the sign over the door. "Look. It says 'way out'. You can't honestly believe that, can you?"

Drake reaches forward, and finds himself pausing, staring at the words above the door, then shakes his head and pushes.

The door yields, spilling them out into the glare of streetlights, into the maze of roads lined with trees that rustle and murmur in the wind, into the cold.

 


End file.
